Blindsight

Blindsight

Author: Peter Watts

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2006-10-03

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1429955198

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Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.


The Commercial Storage of Fruits, Vegetables, and Florist and Nursery Stocks

The Commercial Storage of Fruits, Vegetables, and Florist and Nursery Stocks

Author: Robert E. Hardenburg

Publisher:

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13:

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Note for the electronic edition: This draft has been assembled from information prepared by authors from around the world. It has been submitted for editing and production by the USDA Agricultural Research Service Information Staff and should be cited as an electronic draft of a forthcoming publication. Because the 1986 edition is out of print, because we have added much new and updated information, and because the time to publication for so massive a project is still many months away, we are making this draft widely available for comment from industry stakeholders, as well as university research, teaching and extension staff.


Luxury Arts of the Renaissance

Luxury Arts of the Renaissance

Author: Marina Belozerskaya

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2005-10-01

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0892367857

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Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.


Literature & Composition

Literature & Composition

Author: Carol Jago

Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's

Published: 2010-06-11

Total Pages: 1568

ISBN-13: 9780312388065

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From Carol Jago and the authors of The Language of Composition comes the first textbook designed specifically for the AP* Literature and Composition course. Arranged thematically to foster critical thinking, Literature & Composition: Reading • Writing • Thinking offers a wide variety of classic and contemporary literature, plus all of the support students need to analyze it carefully and thoughtfully. The book is divided into two parts: the first part of the text teaches students the skills they need for success in an AP Literature course, and the second part is a collection of thematic chapters of literature with extensive apparatus and special features to help students read, analyze, and respond to literature at the college level. Only Literature & Composition has been built from the ground up to give AP students and teachers the materials and support they need to enjoy a successful and challenging AP Literature course. Use the navigation menu on the left to learn more about the selections and features in Literature & Composition: Reading • Writing • Thinking. *AP and Advanced Placement Program are registered trademarks of the College Entrance Examination Board, which was not involved in the publication of and does not endorse this product.


The Sun, the Earth, and Near-earth Space

The Sun, the Earth, and Near-earth Space

Author: John A. Eddy

Publisher: Government Printing Office

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780160838088

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" ... Concise explanations and descriptions - easily read and readily understood - of what we know of the chain of events and processes that connect the Sun to the Earth, with special emphasis on space weather and Sun-Climate."--Dear Reader.


The Serpent King

The Serpent King

Author: Jeff Zentner

Publisher: Ember

Published: 2017-06-06

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0553524046

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Named to ten BEST OF THE YEAR lists and selected as a William C. Morris Award Winner,The Serpent King is the critically acclaimed, much-beloved story of three teens who find themselves--and each other--while on the cusp of graduating from high school with hopes of leaving their small-town behind. Perfect for fans of John Green's Turtles All the Way Down. "Move over, John Green; Zentner is coming for you." —The New York Public Library “Will fill the infinite space that was left in your chest after you finished The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” —BookRiot.com Dill isn't the most popular kid at his rural Tennessee high school. After his father fell from grace in a public scandal that reverberated throughout their small town, Dill became a target. Fortunately, his two fellow misfits and best friends, Travis and Lydia, have his back. But as they begin their senior year, Dill feels the coils of his future tightening around him. His only escapes are music and his secret feelings for Lydia--neither of which he is brave enough to share. Graduation feels more like an ending to Dill than a beginning. But even before then, he must cope with another ending--one that will rock his life to the core. Debut novelist Jeff Zentner provides an unblinking and at times comic view of the hard realities of growing up in the Bible belt, and an intimate look at the struggles to find one’s true self in the wreckage of the past. “A story about friendship, family and forgiveness, it’s as funny and witty as it is utterly heartbreaking.” —PasteMagazine.com “A brutally honest portrayal of teen life . . . [and] a love letter to the South from a man who really understands it.” —Mashable.com “I adored all three of these characters and the way they talked to and loved one another.”—New York Times


Writing and Literature

Writing and Literature

Author: Tanya Long Bennett

Publisher: University of North Georgia

Published: 2018-01-10

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9781940771236

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In the age of Buzzfeeds, hashtags, and Tweets, students are increasingly favoring conversational writing and regarding academic writing as less pertinent in their personal lives, education, and future careers. Writing and Literature: Composition as Inquiry, Learning, Thinking and Communication connects students with works and exercises and promotes student learning that is kairotic and constructive. Dr. Tanya Long Bennett, professor of English at the University of North Georgia, poses questions that encourage active rather than passive learning. Furthering ideas presented in Contribute a Verse: A Guide to First-Year Composition as a complimentary companion, Writing and Literature builds a new conversation covering various genres of literature and writing. Students learn the various writing styles appropriate for analyzing, addressing, and critiquing these genres including poetry, novels, dramas, and research writing. The text and its pairing of helpful visual aids throughout emphasizes the importance of critical reading and analysis in producing a successful composition. Writing and Literature is a refreshing textbook that links learning, literature, and life.


The Non-designer's Design Book

The Non-designer's Design Book

Author: Robin Williams

Publisher: Pearson Education

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0133966151

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This guide provides a simple, step-by-step process to better design. Techniques promise immediate results that forever change a reader's design eye. It contains dozens of examples.


Speculative Everything

Speculative Everything

Author: Anthony Dunne

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013-12-06

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0262019841

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How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.


The Great Gastby

The Great Gastby

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Publisher:

Published: 2021-02-14

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9781954921009

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Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, the novel depicts narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby continues to attract popular and scholarly attention. The novel was most recently adapted to film in 2013 by director Baz Luhrmann, while modern scholars emphasize the novel's treatment of social class, inherited wealth compared to those who are self-made, race, environmentalism, and its cynical attitude towards the American dream. As with other works by Fitzgerald, criticisms include allegations of antisemitism. The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary masterwork and a contender for the title of the Great American Novel.